How a veteran fabricator earned the trust of builders, designers — and our own Candy Evans.
Beautiful stone doesn’t become beautiful design on its own. It takes a fabricator with judgment and instinct — and in Dallas, Delia Larralde has become one of the most trusted.
She discovered the craft young, after her family moved from Los Angeles to Torreón, Mexico. A job at a marble company in her early 20s was supposed to be temporary; instead, it set the direction for her career.
Larralde fell in love with the process. First with fabrication, then with the raw, unpredictable beauty of stone pulled from the mountains. Back then, dynamite — not diamond wire — was still used to break boulders loose, and selecting good material required true instinct.
“You had to have a really good eye,” she said. “Because of the dynamite, a lot of stone came down with fractures. One bad choice and the entire boulder was no good.”
From Mexico to Dallas — the Turning Point
After moving to Dallas in the mid-90s, Larralde reinvented herself once more. She started selling handcrafted marble sinks online from her garage. Serendipitously, as that business ran its course, a friend from Mexico who had opened a granite fabrication shop reached out for help…